Community

On Tuesday AOL hosted a Social Media Salon for Internet Week New York where the differences between social media and community management were discussed.[read more]

allison.hare via Compfight cc

Sara Rosso was a bona fide Nutella superfan: a consumer so passionate about Nutella that she had dedicated her precious time to furthering the brand’s cause. She was the type of fan that brand managers dream of. Then Nutella shut her down.[read more]

From the moment Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer announced the $1.1 billion acquisition of Tumblr, the underbelly of the alternative social network bellowed. An avid Tumblr user assures fans not to worry and provides a solution to the advertising question.[read more]

Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications

I had a chance to sit down with Adam Naide, Social Media & Digital Marketing Lead at Cox Communications to discuss some of the topics that you will see at the Social Shake-Up Conference where Adam will be speaking. The following is a transcript of that conversation.[read more]

The most important thing you can do to better delight everyone who comes in contact with your brand is to listen to them. Listen with a goal to understand, not just think about the next thing you can shout back at them. Bottom line, listen more than you talk.[read more]

Your goal each day should be to inspire your audiences to connect with you with a goal of helping them achieve their goals. When you help them achieve their goals, you achieve yours by default. Inspire – Connect Achieve! Don’t make it more complicated than it needs to be. Got it?[read more]

Pinterest on mobile

Over the last few months, Pinterest has made a number of changes and upgrades – no major redesigns or ad implementations that we thought might be coming, but five that are worth noting. To the daily Pinterest user and marketer, a few of these can make a significant change in your life.[read more]

Venn Diagram of Samy & Amy Meltdown

Yelp may not be the go-to source for restaurant reviews. Why? Amy's Baking Company has 1131 reviews, 99.9% of which are snarky, mean, negative “reviews.” How many of those 1131 reviewers actually ate at the restaurant and how many just piled on for flash mob social media bashing? 99.9%[read more]

Ann Smarty: Owner of MyBlogGuest and SEOSmarty.

Getting many of the SEO and social media experts of today in one place is a great way to compare thoughts and figure out what direction to take your business in the coming months. We asked eight industry leaders the following question: "What new SEO or social media tool (or new feature of a tool) are you most excited about using in 2013?"[read more]

Even though Tumblr is often forgotten by brands, it’s still a massive community. In fact, the absence of brands (and the only recent emergence of in-stream advertising) may play a big part in the site’s continued rapid growth. More than 107.5 million blogs and 50.5 billion posts have been created on Tumblr, including the more than 70 million new posts that appear every day.[read more]

Photo credit: Dark Jedi Tumblr 

This post is a love letter to my fellow community managers, as well as a brass-tacks discussion on the practice of community management – the dark and the light side of it. It is also a call to action for community managers to take a proactive stand against burnout — while working all the time may seem like the right thing to do for our communities in the short term, burnout renders us useless to these same communities.[read more]

Write a controversial blog post, tweet someone you wouldn’t dare to on a normal day. Post content that you know will piss someone off. This is how you push the envelope in Social Media, and it is the only way you’ll learn what the boundaries truly are with your audience.[read more]

Ever wonder where a viral pin originates? How many people pinned it before it took off? How long did it take for the pin to go viral? We wondered, too! So, we mapped out Dan Ashbach's most popular pin and found quite the family tree.[read more]

You can imagine our surprise when Yvette was publicly accused of stealing someone else’s blog post in the comments of her own. Plagiarism is a fireable offense here. I won’t stand for it, nor do I want our clients to have to endure what the UPS Store did when they outsourced their content development.[read more]

have a heart on social media 

The next time you feel that massive social platforms have decreased our ability to interact or feel emotion, look for human social media. You will find it in the heartfelt mentions of loved ones now gone, posts asking people to give blood after a tragedy, requests to help find a lost child, friend, or pet.[read more]

Why would I care? Why would I share? These are two key questions that Droga5’s chief creative officer, Ted Royer, says his agency considers when creating social content for brands on Facebook. Create a content calendar that has different types of content offerings every day. Try to diversify as much as possible.[read more]

If you want to grow your business with Facebook, you have to be constantly adding value and engagement on your page. Good content would certainly help you to do that, but good content is wasted and ineffective if you don’t have a supportive community to broadcast your content to.[read more]

Blog images

Sick and tired of the same stale stock photos that everyone else uses? Here are a few free resources and techniques for professional do-it-yourself blog post images that will enhance reader engagement and click-throughs to your blog articles.[read more]

Chris Hadfield

Astronaut Chris Hadfield has successfully returned from a 5-month mission as commander aboard the ISS and has undoubtedly inspired a generation through his unprecedented use of social media and content creation. If you haven’t followed his exploits, not to worry, he has bestowed upon us an absolutely amazing library of content on Facebook, Twitter and YouTube.[read more]

Over the last decade, social media monitoring has become a primary form of business intelligence, used to identify, predict, and respond to consumer behavior. Listening to what your customers, competitors, critics, and supporters are saying about you is key to getting great results from your social media campaigns.[read more]